Give My Regards to Soul and Romance
by LuckyLadybug
Summary: Bret Maverick walked into a bar and ...


**Maverick**

 **Give My Regards to Soul and Romance**

 **By Lucky_Ladybug**

 **Notes: The characters from shows are not mine. Chita and the story are mine! Snakes Tolliver is from** _ **The Wild Wild West**_ **episode** _ **The Night of the Poisonous Posey.**_ **I'm really loving having him as a foil for the Mavericks. This was a story I've basically had in mind for ages, but was prevented from writing until I finished one that came before it. I'm quite pleased to have been able to write it at last, and I think it turned out even better than the basic idea in my mind.**

I can't really count the number of saloons I've been in through the years. Most of them are all alike: the town watering hole where all the interesting characters gather. Some of them are looking to drink away their problems. Others just want to make some easy money. And others, well, they come for the saloon girls.

Me, I usually come for the money. Pappy always taught us never to drink, so I stay away from that. I don't see any value in the taste or in the hangovers; I need my mind as clear as possible. As for the girls, well, it's nice to sit and listen to them sing or walk around the place while I'm bringing in the cash.

I see a lot of people I know in saloons. Sometimes it's my family members; other times, it's friends or acquaintances. And every now and then it's an enemy. I really don't like when that happens. There's few things as troubling as running across an old nemesis, unless it's a drunk old nemesis.

Then even more rarely, I run into someone that I'm just not sure about one way or another.

That was what happened the night I walked into a saloon along the Mississippi River and saw a character in a bluish-purple pinstripe suit sitting at the bar. He was holding a lit cigar between his fingers and staring off into the distance, propped up by his other hand. He was nursing a drink and looked like he'd been at it for a while.

I could have just turned around and walked right back out. Maybe I should have. But instead I walked right up to him. "Snakes?"

Snakes Tolliver, crime boss extraordinaire, jumped a mile out of his mind and turned to look at me with bloodshot eyes. "What do you want, Mr. Maverick?" he growled, sounding pretty similar to a grizzly I had to save my brother Bart from when we were kids.

"I just wondered what you're doing here," I said honestly. "I thought you'd have a town to go hang out in or something."

He sneered at that. "Do you think I have any left, after our meetings?"

"Oh, I thought you still had one or two." I tapped my fingers on the counter. I knew he still had quite a few towns, really; I'd only managed to break his control over a handful compared to the full amount.

"Heh." Snakes took a sip from his drink. "And you're here to gamble, I figure."

"If there's any good games." I glanced over at the poker table. "Looks like things are slow tonight."

Snakes shrugged. "You'd have to start your own game. But I bet you could get several of these characters to fall in with you."

"That's okay. It can keep for a while." I studied him. "What happened to you, Snakes? You look awful."

Snakes looked highly irritated. "Life happened to me, Mr. Maverick, just as it does every day."

I sat down on the next stool over. "You don't usually get yourself completely smashed every day," I pointed out.

"And you'd know, wouldn't you?" Snakes stabbed out the cigar.

Ironically enough, I've probably seen more of Snakes' habits than most people. We have the unfortunate ability to keep running into each other. And I usually see him for several days or weeks on end when that happens. That's how he lost several towns because of me.

"Okay, you're right," Snakes said suddenly. "I don't usually get myself drunk. I try to avoid drinking more than I know I can handle. This just wasn't a good day. No, I take that back. It wasn't a good _week._ " He turned to look at me in annoyance. "But if you think I'm going to confide in you about it, you're crazy. We're enemies."

I shrugged. "You're right, we are. So maybe you can confide in some of your henchmen or the girls in one of your saloons. I can tell you need to get _something_ off your chest."

A cloud passed through his eyes. "As if I'd confide in any of them. They all have one thing in common: they only want my money. They couldn't care less if I have problems, just so long as it doesn't get in the way of them profiting off of me."

"So give me a try," I prodded. "I don't want your money."

That brought a snark. "Hardly." He turned to look at me more. "But let's just say I did tell you. Then you'd know something else about me you really shouldn't."

"So it's something that could be used to ruin you?" I propped myself up with one elbow.

"Nah . . . not really," he mused. "It just makes me look like a dope."

"Well, I suppose everyone looks like that sometimes," I drawled.

I could feel the defeat in him without him saying a word. The way he just plunked the glass down and slowly turned to look at me, I knew he was about to tell me his troubles.

"You ever been married, Mr. Maverick?"

That really caught me off-guard. "No, I've indefinitely postponed the honor." I peered at him. "You?"

"Several years back, right after the War Between the States ended." He downed some more liquor. "You don't need to know the details, just that she married me for all the money I promised I'd make. Then she ran around with just about every guy in New Orleans before I found out. She finally told me she felt she was doing me a great service by marrying me and that no one would marry me for any reason other than she did." He touched the scar on his face that had given him his nickname. "I was damaged merchandise."

I winced. "There's some very nice girls who don't care what a man looks like, if he's a decent sort."

"Yeah? I never met any of 'em. Anyway, I'm not what you'd call 'decent,' am I?" He grinned at me in a sarcastic sort of way.

"You could turn your life around if you really wanted to," I said helplessly, knowing it was a line he'd heard before.

"And be like you? No thanks, Mr. Maverick. I'm not gonna travel all around never knowing where my next meal's coming from." His eyes darkened again. "I'm going to make sure I always know exactly where everything's coming from.

"Anyway, I got the marriage annulled. She wanted to keep going, but only because I was starting to make it big. I wasn't going to let her have any of my roll once I knew she didn't even love me. I cut off communications with her altogether, didn't see her for ages."

"And suddenly she's come back into your life," I deduced.

"Sort of. She's down on her luck and looking for a job." He grabbed the rest of his drink. "I could get her one in one of the towns I own."

"After all she did to you, why would you _want_ to?" I couldn't help exclaiming.

"That's what I keep asking myself. That's why I'm here." He finished off the liquor and set the glass down for the last time. "I don't still love her, Mr. Maverick. Not after what she did. But the funny thing is, it took me a long time to stop loving her even after I knew that. You can't flip love off and on like a lever. And even though I don't love her now, I don't hate her, either. I pity her, I guess. She'll never know real love. She falls in and out of relationships year after year. All she's after is the money. She thinks that will make her happy."

"Money _can_ go a long way towards doing that," I said.

He smirked. "No 'Love of money is the root of all evil' for you, eh?"

"Well, what do you know, someone who finally got the quote right." I had to admit I was surprised. "Most people drop the 'Love of' part."

He gave me a flat look. "Don't get me wrong; I'm not religious and I rarely read the Bible. I just remember some of what I read when I was taught as a kid. But that's not the point.

"The point is that Chita keeps searching for this great happiness she thinks she's going to find. Money isn't going to bring it to her. But she could have had it if her whole life wasn't about dollar signs."

"You mean she could have had it with you," I summed up.

"I loved her. She threw that away. I owe her nothing." He slammed his hand down on the counter. "But I have the means to help her now. And in spite of everything, I don't feel right about not doing it."

This wasn't in the least how I thought this conversation would go. I had figured Snakes was upset about a bad business deal or somebody else taking one of his towns away from him. Instead, the crime boss was sitting there debating over a moral problem.

"She'll just keep coming back for a hand-out from you if she knows you're behind it," I pointed out.

"I wouldn't let her know. She's in the town now; all I have to do is cable a restaurant owner to give her a job as a waitress. He wouldn't mention my name."

"If he's already turned her down, it's probably better if she doesn't get the job," I told him.

"Make no mistake, I don't want her making a nuisance of herself," he retorted. "But if she doesn't get the job, she'll probably turn to selling herself on dark street corners. She's really scraping the bottom of the barrel. And I guess it doesn't matter much after the way she was with the guys in New Orleans; I even caught her with one of them once. But I don't want her ending up a woman of the night. Especially if I could have stopped it."

I just sat for a moment, processing this. This was the bitter crime boss I'd trounced more than once. He cared about immaterial happiness more than his money and he cared about keeping a woman who'd betrayed him from going into the world's oldest profession. I'd known right from the start that there was something different about him, but I'd never expected just how true that was.

"You know," I said at last, "it seems to me that you've already made your mind up. Maybe the real reason you're sitting here drinking yourself out of your mind is because you don't want to believe what you've decided. Maybe you don't want to believe that you can really still care about someone at all, even just to pity them, after how they hurt you."

"I'm not a good person, Mr. Maverick," he growled. "All the people who bullied me and kicked me and physically scarred me for life I've shown what-for. I've detested you for what you've done to me. But I'm sitting here thinking about showing kindness on someone who laughed in my face and told me my only value was monetary? It doesn't make sense."

"A lot of times, compassion doesn't," I said. "Those people who bullied you and scarred you, and me breaking up your towns, that's all you ever knew of us. You didn't love us and want to do everything you could to make us happy. That's something unique to Chita. But you've shown me kindness too, when we get down to it. The truth is, Snakes, that no matter how horrible you think you are, and how horrible you try to make people like me think you are, you're just not good at being horrible."

He clenched his hand into a fist. "Good people only get beat down," he hissed. "I've lived most of my life getting beat down. I'm sick of it. That's why I got into crime and started building my empire, to finally be on top for once. It's not about the money; it's about survival. I can't go back to what I was before. I _can't._ "

"It's your choice." I slid off the stool. "But good people can and do come out on top. I'm sorry your experiences have been so terrible, but that doesn't change the truth."

That brought him up with a sharp, furious start. "Yeah, good people like _you._ That's another reason why I dislike you so much, Mr. Maverick. You succeeded where I failed. You're this goody-two-shoes gambler who always stops to help anyone he finds who's in trouble. You get yourself in trouble day in and day out, but somehow you always manage to come out on top eventually. And you never have enough. What's the matter with you? How can you stand always getting accused of murder or getting beat up by gangs or getting swindled by fatal females?"

"I don't like any of those things," I told him evenly. "But I'd dislike being untrue to myself even more."

He swore at me and got off his stool. "True to yourself," he spat. "Well, go be true to yourself somewhere else." He practically slammed a coin on the bar to pay for his drinks and stormed out of the saloon.

I just watched him go. There was nothing more I could say to him right then, in his condition.

I didn't see him again that trip. But today I was in a little riverfront town and happened to stop in at a restaurant. I was waited on by a pretty dark-haired thing who seemed happy to have a place to be at this point in her life. She had a shiny nametag that said _Chita._


End file.
